A blog about poetry, literature, and art, that occasionally engages other issues of importance and interest.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

You Must Catch Yourself Somewhere or Fall Anywhere

I first encountered Kathleen Fraser’s work in the early 1980s, in her “Partial local coherence,” an essay published in the late, lamented, and, as she accurately describes it, “ever-foraging” journal Ironwood that examined the then-still-emergent phenomenon of Language poetry. That essay concluded with her poem “Medusa’s hair was snakes. Was thought, split inward,” still one of my favorites. (The essay is reprinted in Fraser’s collection Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity, though the book version omits the poem.) I then encountered a substantial selection of her poems, plus a self-interview, in Philip Dow’s inspiringly eclectic anthology 19 New American Poets of the Golden Gate, published in 1984 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and now sadly out of print. That anthology organized itself around place rather than school or movement, and its combination of substantial selections from each poet with prose introductions from each strongly influenced the structure of my Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries.

Fraser began writing in the Nineteen-Sixties as a more "conventional" poet and, as a result of her immersion in the evolving San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene, transformed herself into a more “experimental” poet.* (In the manner of Derrida, I would like to put such terms under erasure [sur rature], simultaneously deploying them and cancelling them out.) As both a poet and an editor of the journal HOW(ever), she has become a leading figure in contemporary American innovative poetry and poetics, especially in the area of experimental(ly) feminist poetics.

Medusa’s hair was snakes. Was thought, split inward.

I do not wish to report on Medusa directly, this variation of herwrithing. After she gave that voice a shape, it was the trajectory itselfin which she found her words floundering and pulling apart.

Sometimes we want to talk to someone who can’t hear us.Sometimes we’re too far away. So is a shadowa real shadow.

When he said “red cloud,” she imagined redbut he thought cloud (this dissonance in which she was feelingtrapped, out-of-step, getting from here to there).

Historical continuityaccounts for knowing what dead words point to,

a face staring down through green leaves as the man looks upfrom tearing and tearing again at his backyard weeds. His red dog sniffsat what he’s turned over. You know what I mean.We newer people have children who learn to listen as we listen.

Medusa trying to point with her hair.That thought turned to venom.That muscle turning to thought turningto writhing out.

We try to locate blame, going backwards.I point with my dog’s stiff neckand will not sit down,the way that girl points her saxophone at the guitar playerto shed lightupon his next invention. He attends her silences, between keys,and underscores them with slow referents.

Can she substitute dog for cloud, if red comes first?Red tomato.Red strawberry.

As if all of this happens on the ocean one afternoon in July,red sunset soaking into white canvas. The natural world.Darkness does eventually come down.He closes her eye in the palm of his hand.The sword comes down.

Now her face rides above his sails, her hair her splitting tongues.

Flashes of light or semaphore waves, the soundof rules, a regularity from which the clouds driftinto their wet embankments.

These labdanum hours

You couldn’t find it in the bird’s weightpulling an arc through the twig. You must

*Contemporary American poetry is rife with such conversion narratives, from Lowell’s abandonment of rhyme and meter and turn to confessionalism in Life Studies to James Wright’s rejection of narrative in favor of the “deep image” in The Bough Will Not Break to Merwin’s turn from a measured classicism to the apocalyptic, visionary poems of The Lice. All of these breaks and transformations were both less abrupt and less total than the conversion narrative can allow or account for. “I once saw not quite as clearly as I could have but now I see somewhat better” just doesn’t have the same ring as “I was once blind but now I see.” In the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, to write in free verse, throwing off the formal and mental shackles of rhyme and meter (“To break the pentameter, that was the first heave,” as Pound wrote in 1920), was considered a moral and even political act (a redemption/liberation from sinful formalism celebrated in such "open forms" anthologies as 1969's Naked Poetry) by many of those same poets now condemned in some circles as obviously and irredeemably reactionary. This can serve as a dictionary example of irony. As Marx observed some time ago, history repeats itself, the second (or third, or fourth) time as farce.

About Me

Reginald Shepherd is the editor of The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press, 2004) and of Lyric Postmodernisms (Counterpath Press, 2008). He is the author of: Fata Morgana (2007), winner of the Silver Medal of the 2007 Florida Book Awards, Otherhood (2003), a finalist for the 2004 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Wrong (1999), Angel, Interrupted (1996), and Some Are Drowning (1994), winner of the 1993 Associated Writing Programs’ Award in Poetry (all University of Pittsburgh Press). Shepherd's work has appeared in four editions of The Best American Poetry and two Pushcart Prize anthologies, as well as in such journals as American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Yale Review. It has also been widely anthologized. He is also the author of Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (Poets on Poetry Series, University of Michigan Press). Shepherd has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, the Florida Arts Council, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other awards and honors.